Brandon Corbins Head Indianapolis Product & Technology Evangelist

I wanted to give some public love to JS-KIT for their killer javascript embed-able web apps. JS-KIT gives you the ability to add some amazing features to any web page with 2 lines of javascript! It’s simple crazy brilliant!

You can add Comments, Ratings and Reviews, Polls, and other dynamic content in an instant. JS-Kit is an absolute must see for any developer/designer (and smart business people because it’s FREE).

Here is how you integration their commenting application in to any webpage that you have.

<div class="js-kit-comments" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>


See how I am using their Comments widget in my Pickylist Feedback posting

Dear Duke Energy,

I would like to activate my account online, as I very much cherish the wonderful utilities that you bring to me in my daily life. However, in your quest to make your website “Web 2.0″ cool, with Wizbang Ajax, you have managed to make me and every other Firefox and Safari user, unable to achieve our goal of SIGNING UP FOR YOUR SERVICE!  Look, I understand that you’re a Microsoft shop, and making Microsoft powered websites look and act  “Simple” is a really really hard - but for the sake of everyone, at least make your registration work on non Microsoft browsers.

Dear Duke Energy Web Guys,

Please don’t try to resize my browser window, I understand that it might be for some really really important reason (to you) - but just stop. You do not have permission to get my properties of my Window.resizeFrame, so stop trying. While we are on the topic, it’s also breaking your dynamically loaded County selector.

But lucky for you, you left the old way in the code, so it will be easy to go back. (while you’re at it, get rid of those tables, it’s a simple form! Oh yea, I forgot - Microsoft shop… Sorry

Line 227: http://imcltebizt.duke-energy.com/Content/SAS/new_service_location.asp

	<div id="CountyLabel" style="visibility: hidden;">
		Please select your County:
	</div>
	....
	<div id="CountyList" style="visibility: hidden;">
		<select name='cboCounty' onchange='inputChanged()' size='1'><OPTION value=''> </OPTION><OPTION value='Bartholomew'>Bartholomew</OPTION><OPTION value='Benton'>Benton</OPTION><OPTION value='Boone'>Boone</OPTION>....</select>
	</div>

Sincerely,
Brandon Corbin

I have been foaming at the mouth since I read this post about a LinkedIn API. (For the none techie - an API gives you the ability to grab information from LinkedIn and pull that data in to another website, plus a whole lot more). However, so far LinkedIn has yet to deliver anything I can use.

On the bright side, I think LinkedIn’s decision to utilize Google’s OpenSocial platform, will ultimately bring my dreams data freedom to fruition. But being the impatient person that I am, I can wait no longer. And ultimately, I have decided to take matters in to my own fingers and write a LinkedIn Public Profile API.

Let’s use my LinkedIn Profile as an example:

Public LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brandoncorbin
LinkedIn API XML Profile: http://jobfu.org/brandoncorbin-asxml

The Result is an XML document containing all of the information from the Users public profile, as well as the last 10 blog posts (if the user supplied a “My Blog” or “My RSS Feed”).

This photo (unfortunately) was taking only 20 minutes from where I live.

I predict in 5 years (hopefully sooner), the keyboard and mouse will be a thing of the past.

Do you know what a Captcha is? I am sure you have dealt with them, but I bet most of you don’t know what their purpose is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of programmers out there that write “bots” that are small little programs that run on a computer and scourer websites trying to find vulnerabilities in order to take control of the site. A webpage with a form is the most vulnerable - a lot of wanna-be-developers do not understand the fundamentals of how data flows, and because of that, they make it fairly easy to inject code in to a website form and obliterate their entire database. Scary shit, to say the least.

In order to protect ourselves from these malicious form posting robots, we will show the website user an image that only a human can decipher, the human then responds with the answer (in this case filling out the form for what letters you see), and then we know you are not a bot.

But I see a bigger problem here than just a simple database delete - instead I see the fundamental problem of “here comes the robots”.

This need to protect ourselves is due evil geeks - they are the people who take great ideas and intentions and twist them for their own use or to cause chaos in general. Sure, this doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact on humanity when its only a website. Where it gets a bit hairy however, is when these people inevitably get access to technology (geek trickle down effect) that will far surpass our own brain by an unspeakable amount.

Imagine when IBM finishes the Blue Brain Project (reverse-engineering the human brain down to each neuron), and plugs that beast in to the Internet. What would an “All-knowing” entity do when “it” saw the horror that we humans have created in our short span on this planet? Our destruction, our incessant need to find an enemy and kill them, or our incalculable number of killings simply because someone “is wrong” when “we were right”. Back to iRobot again…

Even in our short technical existence, we already have to “fight” our own technology, it’s a fairly easy and steady fight because the “good geeks” and the “bad geeks” all relatively have the same mental capacity. But mark my words, the fight is going to get a whole lot harder when we are up against programs that can out smart us by 1000 to 1.

Jott you had me at “Who do you want to jott?”. Jott.com is a mobile service that converts your voice in to text. How many times have you been struck by brilliance while driving? Every time it happens to me, I now hit my jott.com favorite and boom it’s captured.

On top of the basics, you can send your messages to other people in your address book (after adding them to Jott). But the part that almost made me giggle, is the Voice-2-Blog feature. As you will see in the message below - I can now post my verbal ramblings directly to my blog.

Okay, you have to go check out jott.com. Because I am actually posting to my blog right now from my phone, if it works this is going to be absolutely beautiful. Alright, thanks. listen

Fawnt is a font resource for designers, developers, and anyone that appreciates the web’s highest quality fonts.

Fawnt - Top free fonts | Font - Archive | Blog Design and Webdesign

Blogged with Flock

I often find it relaxing to slow down for a moment and truly appreciate a beautiful font.  Qlassik being one of my current favorites - check out some other free fonts from this Smashing Magazine post… 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design | Fonts | Smashing Magazine

Took a cue from Cheezhead today and trotted over to the newly redesigned Employmentguide.com. While it does have a much more …vibrant look (the front page is busier than Jackee from 227), it seems like it might just be a nip/tuck job as opposed This Old House. Very interested in this tidbit: Said vice president and read more… Appendant Marketing Group Blog » Blog Archive » A walkover to Employmentguide.com

My 10 year old daughter has been my “usability tester” on virtually every application I have built over the last 4 years. Usually, I do not have the money nor the time for formal usability group testing, instead I figure “if my daughter can solve various tasks in my product - then at least 80% of adults should be able to as well”. Personally, I am happy with 80% of anything.

4 steps to building simple software using a child.

1. Secure a child between the ages of 6 and 11.
The ages between 6 and 11 tend to be the optimal age range for testing software for “simpleness”. Since reading is still a newer concept to our testers - they tend to “guess” how to execute a specific task, instead of “reading” what to do. Children 12 and older are already more advanced compared to most adults, which ultimately will skew the results.

2. Define your Tasks.
Be very specific in what your tasks are. For example: “Sign up for this website”, “Search for a Photo”, “Send this X to a friend”.
Avoid using words that are written on the website to define your task. e.g. “Sign up for this Website”, when the copy on the site reads “Create an Account”.

3. Observe and BACK OFF.
While the child is solving the task, no matter what… DO NOT HELP. You will be frustrated, confused and maybe even angry as you watch your test subject hop around the page blindly, but YOU have to remain out of the experiment. Observe where the child moves the mouse, what items they click or almost click, the pieces of information that they try to read, the images that draw their attention, etc. WATCH EVERYTHING with intense attention and the cracks of your software will present themselves.

4. Rinse and Repeat.
You can do these steps until the child finally gives up.

The clearer mind of a child is a great place to test for simplicity, and a great way to keep the developers own higher consciousness in check.

As any proud father, I have to give props to Maddy’s own website property Kedet.com - kid powered news.

Tags: usability